Why aren't more people taking up scuba diving?

[bshmerlie]

Why aren't more people taking up Scuba?

If you are young the initial cost of Scuba is probably overwhelming. Realistically you're looking at $1500 per person just to get started (OW class and the gear). If they don't buy their own gear then they have to resort to spending $60-$70 each time they go out. Young folks just don't have that kind of money to spend on a regular basis.

If they are older. Let's face it the gear is heavy. Lugging 60+ pounds up and down to the water is not fun or not even an option for many folks.

So basically the young have difficulty affording it and the old have difficulty physically doing it. Snorkeling is free and easy and that is what most people do if they want to look at fish.

Then of course all the warnings about how dangerous diving can be doesn't help our cause. I must admit the mental image of drowning is a little bit discouraging.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Just another thought on why scuba grew in the 60's and not now.

If you look back at skin and scuba diving then, it had a mystique, it was adventure. Not many people dove yet and there was a lot of uncharted waters that nobody really new what was under the waves. Non divers had to take the word of the diver that it was another world and danger was everywhere. It was new and exciting. It wasn't easy to get involved in either because of the training, but people did it.
There was stuff on TV and in the movies about diving. Sea Hunt, Thunderball, Jacques Cousteau, and a bunch of other TV shows and movies.
Kids had plenty of hero's that were divers. The divers looked sleek, bad ass, they carried spear guns and big knives, they were in shape, they were on par with an astronaut and had the same sort of death defying swagger about them, surviving by artificial means in an environment that could kill them.
Just look at the scene from Thunderball and how sleek and stealthy those divers looked as compared to how they look now.
I even remember as a kid growing up in Carmel/Monterey when we were on the beach, divers would come out of the water looking exactly like Sea Hunt or a Thunderball diver, that was what a diver wore.

Lets look at what was needed then to be a diver.
The following prices may not be exact but I'm just going to have to fake a few of them. Please feel free to correct me if you happen to know better what actual pricing was.
Wetsuit - $89
Hood - $5 - $7
Bootie socks $5 - $7
fins $14.95
regulator set $79.00 no octo - no SPG
Tank with J rod $29.00 ?
Straps for tank (harness) w/ bands $8.95?
mask 12.95
snorkel - straight J style $3.95
weights and belt $10
depth gauge 14.95?
watch ?
Training $100?...I don't know

Estimate total with gear and training: $375


Now: (this is just for basic OW with student buying average gear from LDS)
Training for OW $500 average
Wetsuit $379.00 two piece 7mm farmer John
Hood $79
booties $59
Gloves $49
fins average $150
weights needed average $3 per lb. / 30#= $90
Tank $359 steel
Jacket BC average $700 mid range
Reg set with octo average from LDS $800
Computer average mid range $300
SPG $79
Mask $89
snorkel $39

Total price $3672.00

*Add a drysuit and fancier computer and it goes up.

Both comparisons are for cold water 53 to 60 degrees (my area and Southern Cal.)


So look at what scuba meant and was then as opposed to what it means and is now.
Then scuba was for the hard core meat eating "A" type that would come out of the water dragging a big fish that he speared for dinner (the provider type),
To now, a family adventure full of fun, anybody can do it, look at pretty fish, look but don't touch, spearfishing is looked down upon by the vegans and even in some cases speafishermen have been acosted on beaches when they are within their legal rights, etc.
Back then divers marched into the water, put thir fins on and dove in head first powering their way through the surf and on out to dive. Now they waddle down to the waters edge holding hands and looking stuffed sausages and get rag dolled in thigh high surf and rolled around not able to get back up.
Then a diver got dressed out of the back of a regular car and hiked down to the beach and jumped in. Now they show up to the dive site with bigs tubs full of gear that they load on carts and have to set up work tables to get their stuff ready. They have their crap strewn everywhere and nobody else can get a spot at a picnic table.

If a little kid is on a beach and sees a freediver or a stealth minimalist scuba diver get out of the water dressed in a sleek black wetsuit with a speargun in one hand and a big fish in the other,... Or, a couple of waddling scuba divers dressed in the latest gear with pretty colored panels in their wetsuits and a pretty matching reg covers, who do you think they are going to think is cooler?

This is where it starts, with kids. It did with me.
You can disagree all you want about spearfishing vs looky loo vs photog, vs anything else.
The fact is kids like to see the adventure/speargun/big knife side of diving. I know, they swarm me everytime I get out on a beach here where I dive, because I usually have a big lingcod on my stringer. Other divers that are out just for fun dives get no attention at all.
So that tells me that what normal diving has become is not what youngsters have in mind as something fun and adventurous or cool.

The other group of divers people in general swarm are abalone freedivers because they want to see what kind of abs we got and how big. They hear about them and the whole ultra delicacy woo-haw so they are very curious to know how we get them, where we find them, etc.

 

[TMHeimer]

Eric S. Regarding your price comparison: I know BCDs were not in use back then, but you don't absolutely need a computer today either. As well, I assume your prices are all for brand new stuff? I bought most stuff used. My total outlay to start didn't approach your figure (this was for me 2005). All things being equal, are you saying the cost of becoming a diver has gone up more than inflation over 50 years?

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Eric S. Regarding your price comparison: I know BCDs were not in use back then, but you don't absolutely need a computer today either. As well, I assume your prices are all for brand new stuff? I bought most stuff used. My total outlay to start didn't approach your figure (this was for me 2005). All things being equal, are you saying the cost of becoming a diver has gone up more than inflation over 50 years?

I don't know if the cost of gear has gone up with inflation or not. I'm guessing that prices might have been slightly higher then, but now you need more stuff, so it might be that it was a better deal then.
And yes the cost comparison is for new gear in each case because used gear can't be counted on as a fixed price point. I got a lot of gear for free too but you can't count that as a reliable option, or the cost of any used gear for that matter, the prices are all over the board - that would be considered a bonus.
I also did figure it as needing a computer since that has become the norm in most OW courses.

One other factor to consider is that then there were decent union jobs that payed well relative to the cost of living. Now there are college grads out working at department stores and many new part time jobs. There are a lot of people under-employed. Also rents or the cost of housing in general (at least here in CA) is very high, and also the cost of fuel, food, and now medical expenses with insurance premiums through the roof, all this takes away from disposable income to do hobbies.
So *if* you were to take a standard union wage then and whatever a standard union wage is now, which is very hard to do since there are very few union jobs around plus an wider wage variable now with many different classifications, I would say union pay was better then.
Most union workers were able to buy a house with the wife staying at home and have the mortgage payment made with one weeks pay. Whereas now it takes one persons full months pay for the house payment and the second person pays the other bills and food. Except with the tech boomers, they are in a class all by themselves. I'm not talking about 1%'ers.

 

[boulderjohn]

Just another thought on why scuba grew in the 60's and not now.

In the 1960s, scuba was nearly starting from zero. In the 1950s, instruction across the world was pretty helter skelter. There was no real consistency to what was taught and where it was taught. YMCAs were teaching it, but not with any kind of unified effort; each site did it its own way, and they actually resisted later attempts to organize it. My cousin learned in the early 1960s--the salesman in a the local sporting goods shop told him what to do. NAUI was formed in 1960. The Chicago branch of NAUI dropped out and became PADI in 1965. Everything was just starting then. It had nowhere to go but up.

To my knowledge, PADI is the only agency that that publishes its certification statistics. Here are the full data for PADI: http://www.padi.com/scuba-diving/about-padi/statistics/

They indicate a steep and steady increase in the number of certifications (including advanced) through 2004. The totals continued at about the same level until the world-wide recession in 2008-2009, after which there was an immediate dip followed by a gradual recovery. The numbers for the past two years are actually not far from the peak of 2004, staying close to 950,000 per year. In comparison, from 1967-1970, PADI had a combined total of 42,572 certifications, meaning they annually averaged roughly 1% of the totals they do today.

I talked with the PADI regional manager last year about the whole scuba market, and he said it is hard to tell because they don't have numbers from the other agencies. He believed that PADI handles a bit more than half of the total certifications world wide each year, and about 80% in the United States (IIRC).

So, while the statistics for PADI at least do not show the annual increases observed in previous decades, they really don't show a drop off, either. Numbers are actually rising after the drop from the recession.

According to this 2007 Undercurrent article, in 2002, PADI, SSI, NAUI, and SDI agreed to share data, and they reported a combined 177,000 new certifications. PADI has reported more total certifications in every year after 2002, including the recession years, so if the others have also kept up the pace, then we should be seeing at least that number of new certifications each year today.

 

[redacted]

OK, so the popularity of scuba is falling and sea levels are rising!!!


Do we have a problem?

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

In the 1960s, scuba was nearly starting from zero. In the 1950s, instruction across the world was pretty helter skelter. There was no real consistency to what was taught and where it was taught. YMCAs were teaching it, but not with any kind of unified effort; each site did it its own way, and they actually resisted later attempts to organize it. My cousin learned in the early 1960s--the salesman in a the local sporting goods shop told him what to do. NAUI was formed in 1960. The Chicago branch of NAUI dropped out and became PADI in 1965. Everything was just starting then. It had nowhere to go but up.

To my knowledge, PADI is the only agency that that publishes its certification statistics. Here are the full data for PADI: http://www.padi.com/scuba-diving/about-padi/statistics/

They indicate a steep and steady increase in the number of certifications (including advanced) through 2004. The totals continued at about the same level until the world-wide recession in 2008-2009, after which there was an immediate dip followed by a gradual recovery. The numbers for the past two years are actually not far from the peak of 2004, staying close to 950,000 per year. In comparison, from 1967-1970, PADI had a combined total of 42,572 certifications, meaning they annually averaged roughly 1% of the totals they do today.

I talked with the PADI regional manager last year about the whole scuba market, and he said it is hard to tell because they don't have numbers from the other agencies. He believed that PADI handles a bit more than half of the total certifications world wide each year, and about 80% in the United States (IIRC).

So, while the statistics for PADI at least do not show the annual increases observed in previous decades, they really don't show a drop off, either. Numbers are actually rising after the drop from the recession.

According to this 2007 Undercurrent article, in 2002, PADI, SSI, NAUI, and SDI agreed to share data, and they reported a combined 177,000 new certifications. PADI has reported more total certifications in every year after 2002, including the recession years, so if the others have also kept up the pace, then we should be seeing at least that number of new certifications each year today.

John,
Do they have any data on what happens to the divers or activity of the divers once they get their initial certification?
So in other words, there might be record number of dive certifications, but are there a record number of total dives made by these new divers after initial certification.
This is the important part. The initial cert is just one sale, the long term activity level is the true growth part for the rest of the industry past the cert agency.

 

[TN-Steve]

One thing I'm curious about, the PADI numbers are total certifications. (OW, AOW, Deep, NITROX etc) granted. Back in the early days, how many certifications were there? The way I view it is that things have been pretty much static overall from 04 onward. Also interesting that the male / female ratio is pretty much unchanging.

I know when I went through my OW, there were at least 2 women in the class who were getting certified because, according to their own words, "My boyfriend dives and he wants me to get certified". Without an inner motivation I doubt that they will be active divers in the future.

Diving, to me, isn't an 'extreme' activity. It's an activity that has a high degree of inherent risk, but with education, diving in my comfort limit and thinking a bit about what I'm doing I can bring that risk down to a very acceptable level.

How do we get new divers in? A good package of affordable rental gear, getting the word out to people who may not be aware that there is diving in their area, (I was surprised at how active a dive community there was here in TN/KY). We have a lot of guys from Ft. Campbell that dive, maybe some kind of outreach to colleges would be good.

I don't have any answers, but I think that perhaps the various agencies had best come up with some ideas.

RBS

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

According to John's numbers I'm now wondering if there really is any problem and all this is just a figment of our imaginations.
The data, according to John, shows that scuba overall has increased and only decreased momentarily during the reccession, and now has regained all the loss plus an increase.
That's not the picture I get when I go into a dive shop, but then a lot of sales have moved to the internet so maybe gear sales have increased overall to keep up with demand from the new certifications. Or the other thing that may be happennig is that gear sales are less than equal to the total certifications because a lot of the gear used is rental gear?
And last, where are most of these record number of certifications taking place? Are they mostly at vacation resorts, because it certainly 'ain't around here.

 

[boulderjohn]

There really isn't a lot of really good data for all these questions, frankly.

There is no question that there are local dive shops closing, but that could be, as has been suggested, a result of Internet sales.

I got a good idea about that myself recently when trying to purchase some technical gear that is not at all mainstream. The dive shop with which I work does its best to give me the best prices they can. I asked about a pretty unusual piece--a helium/oxygen analyzer. I am sure they have never sold one in the history of their existence, and I would probably be their only customer ever for that item in the future. They contacted the company, with whom they have a business relationship, and the company told them what it would cost them at their level of business. (The more business you do, the better the wholesale price you get from the manufacturer.) I had the email forwarded to me--my shop was willing to let me buy it at the wholesale price, earning not one dime on their own for brokering the deal.

I could get it for much less by buying it online from one of the big outlets at their advertised price, paying full retail. That's how much their volume discount was.

How can a local shop in a small market compete with that? No wonder they are gong out of business.